Question about Classes

Hello, all. I have a sort of theoretical/sort of dumb question about
PHP classes, which I haven't really worked with and don't entirely
understand the purpose of, so here goes:

Say i want to handle the add or update or delete of an item to a MySQL
db, and instead of having three functions (function addItem, function
updateItem, function deleteItem), it seems I could:

a) have one function (modifyItem) with some sort of attribute saying
which type it is, and then if/else through to the appropriate type of
operation based on this flag, i.e.,

modifyItem($array_of_data, 'update') chooses the update switch

b) have a modifyItem class, with the three possible functions inside

c) stick with my three original functions

Is b) the sort of thing you might use a class for, or do I
misunderstand? If not, what would be some "classic" uses of classes
in our php/mysql world?

(I've looked at the manual, php cookbook, etc., I'm just trying to get
a very general sense of what sorts of situations are best handled by
classes.)

Thanks for any thoughts,

Andrew

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Re: Question about Classes

Andrew Darby wrote:
> Hello, all. I have a sort of theoretical/sort of dumb question about
> PHP classes, which I haven't really worked with and don't entirely
> understand the purpose of, so here goes:
>
> Say i want to handle the add or update or delete of an item to a MySQL
> db, and instead of having three functions (function addItem, function
> updateItem, function deleteItem), it seems I could:
>
> a) have one function (modifyItem) with some sort of attribute saying
> which type it is, and then if/else through to the appropriate type of
> operation based on this flag, i.e.,
>
> modifyItem($array_of_data, 'update') chooses the update switch
>
> b) have a modifyItem class, with the three possible functions inside
>
> c) stick with my three original functions

Using any of these methods, how would you construct a query to actually
run? Do you need to pass in the fieldnames and the data? eg:

$data = array('newstitle' => $title, 'newscontent' => $data);

How about which table to place this data in?

It would get complicated I think..

I construct my queries elsewhere then hand it to my db class for
processing. It has some basic functions:

- Query (runs pg_query/mysql_query)
- Fetch (runs pg_fetch_assoc/mysql_fetch_assoc)
- Quote (runs pg_escape_string/mysql_escape_string)

and so on.

> Is b) the sort of thing you might use a class for, or do I
> misunderstand? If not, what would be some "classic" uses of classes
> in our php/mysql world?

OOP is good for API's.


http://www.designmagick.com/article/18/PHP/Introduction-to-O bject-Oriented-Programming

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